Category Archives: Oil

This morning the EPA released its long-awaited, multi-year study of hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking,” though those of us with more refined sensibilities call it “rock-massaging”), and it’s going to be a major bummer for the anti-energy left. Here’s the Wall Street Journal headline:

A decade into an energy boom led by hydraulic fracturing, the Environmental Protection Agency has concluded there is no evidence the practice has had a “widespread, systemic impact on drinking water.”

The report is the federal government’s most comprehensive examination of the issue of fracking and drinking water, and it bolsters the position staked out by the energy industry and its supporters: that fracking can be carried out safely and doesn’t need to pose a threat to water.

If you’re a glutton for the full 1,000 pages of the EPA report (eventually I will be), the portal to the complete report and its appendices is here.

We did not find evidence that these mechanisms have led to widespread, systemic impacts on drinking water resources in the United States. Of the potential mechanisms identified in this report, we found specific instances where one or more mechanisms led to impacts on drinking water resources, including contamination of drinking water wells. The number of identified cases, however, was small compared to the number of hydraulically fractured wells.

American ingenuity and free markets are quickly finding ways to more efficiently and cheaply produce crude oil — bad news for the Saudis.

So what’s going on here? Lots of news coverage lately has focused on how the U.S. oil industry is struggling amid low crude prices. It’s hypothesized by some energy experts that Saudi Arabia is continuing to pump out oil, therefore keeping prices down and pricing out costlier shale production.

Yes, there have been job cuts and fewer oil rigs being used to drill new wells, but companies are becoming more efficient and focusing on the most productive shale plays. That means companies are producing more with less.

President Obama on Friday ignored his own State Department’s research on the Keystone XL oil pipeline, dismissing the project and casting it as both economically unimportant and potentially harmful to the environment.

Speaking at a town-hall meeting at Benedict College in Columbia, S.C., the president defended his recent veto of legislation that would have approved Keystone. Mr. Obama said he vetoed the bill for technical reasons and has not yet made a final decision on the project.

“Its proponents argue that it would be creating jobs in the United States. But the truth is … it will probably create a couple thousand construction jobs for a year or two,” he said. “We’re not going to authorize a pipeline that benefits largely a foreign company if it can’t be shown that it is safe and if it can’t be shown that, overall, it would not contribute to climate change.”

But Mr. Obama’s own State Department contradicts his claims. The department’s environmental review of Keystone already has determined the pipeline would not significantly increase greenhouse-gas emissions or contribute in a measurable way to climate change because, the federal government predicts, Canada will extract its oil and send it to market with or without the project.

Harry Reid is taking unprecedented steps to block Senate Republicans, even though his actions will result in nothing but procedural delay.

In another example of Democrats playing the role of obstructionists, Harry Reid will force the Senate to go through procedural hurdles to delay Majority Leader Mitch McConnell from bringing up the president’s Keystone XL veto for an override vote.

Last week, President Obama vetoed the popular bipartisan Keystone XL Pipeline bill passed by the Senate.

This week, the Senate is planning a vote to override the president’s veto. Democrats, led by Minority Leader Harry Reid, are set to revoke normal order and attempt to filibuster the override of the President’s veto message.

The cloture vote on a veto message will be the first in the history of the United States Senate. That is because the threshold for a veto override is 67, while the threshold for a cloture vote is only 60. The cloture vote is nothing more than a redundancy since it is assumed cloture would be reached if the Senate were aiming for a two-thirds override.

“The number of senators required to end debate is less than the number required to override a veto,” the Congressional Research Service said.

The Senate majority, joined by a number of Democrats as well, will file for cloture on Wednesday so that the override vote can take place on Thursday.

McConnell called out Reid’s actions on the Senate floor on Monday. He deplored Reid for partisan posturing that stands in direct contrast to the bipartisan spirit exhibited in the Keystone bill.

“There is no reason for a filibuster other than to delay and cause gridlock simply for its own sake.,” McConnell said. “It’s certainly disappointing, but the new Congress won’t be deterred from fighting for jobs and the middle class.”

As expected, the president has vetoed the bill that passed both houses (surviving a Senate filibuster) that would have authorized a pipeline that would move crude oil from the Alberta oils sands region and the Bakken shield in North Dakota, a state now producing more oil than any other except Texas, to the Gulf coast.

This veto was, of course, not unexpected and it is unlikely to be overridden in either house of Congress. So the bill was, in a sense, just a political gesture on the part of the new Republican-controlled Congress. It is only the president’s third veto in more than six years in office, but there is likely to be many more as he no longer has Harry Reed to protect him politically.

But his stated reasons for the veto are almost comical:

In a message to Congress, Mr. Obama cited the ongoing State Department review as the reason for his veto, saying “because this act of Congress conflicts with established executive branch procedures and cuts short thorough consideration of issues that could bear on our national interest—including our security, safety and environment—it has earned my veto.”

“Through this bill, the United States Congress attempts to circumvent longstanding and proven processes for determining whether or not building and operating a cross-border pipeline serves the national interest,” Mr. Obama wrote. He added that while the presidential veto is an executive power he takes seriously, “I also take seriously my responsibility to the American people.”

Asked if the Obama administration might eventually approve the pipeline after the State Department review is complete, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said, “That possibility still does exist. This is an ongoing review.”

This is truly rich. There is not a person on planet earth who thinks that the Keystone XL Pipeline has not been studied enough already to make informed judgments. And President Obama stated on 22 occasions that the executive branch lacked the power to change immigration law, a power reserved to Congress. But once the 2014 election was out of the way, he changed the law anyway by executive order. His complaint was that Congress had failed to act and so he had to. But when Congress, fed up with the unconscionable foot-dragging over an oil pipeline, tried to do by constitutionally correct means what the president had refused to do, he is outraged at an attempt “to circumvent longstanding and proven processes.” In other words, the Constitution is optional for the Obama administration, but executive branch procedures are absolute for Congress.

This is shameless, but what else could be expected of this administration?

“The permitting for the Keystone pipeline has taken longer than it took for the United States to win World War II.”

The Senate passed legislation Thursday to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, a vote that will result in President Barack Obama’s first veto of legislation from the new Republican-led House and Senate.

Senate Republicans called up the Keystone bill as the first piece of legislation in the new Senate, and gave the Senate a different look by allowing consideration of several amendments to the bill throughout January.

The final vote was 62-36, and only 51 were needed for passage.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said earlier in the day that it’s time to pass the common-sense bill that Republicans and even many Democrats support.

“Constructing Keystone would pump billions into our economy. It would support thousands of good American jobs,” McConnell said. “And as the president’s own State Department has indicated, it would do this with minimal environmental impact.”

Bloomberg reported that the Department of the Interior plan supported by Obama would “protect” 12.28 million acres of land in addition to 7 million acres already set aside as wilderness. Yet, this area could contain 10.3 billion barrels of oil, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS). Since the 1970s, there has been a fight over whether or not to drill in small portion of ANWR.

The White House released video of ANWR showing beautiful wildlife and snow peaked mountains, but little of the coastal plains some have described as “tundra.” In 2001, CBS “60 Minutes” was much more honest. Reporter Lesley Stahl took a trip to the proposed drilling site in ANWR which looked more like Siberia than the garden of Eden.

But many liberal news outlets have used similar footage or descriptions as the Obama White House to influence the political debate over drilling there. NBC’s “Today” showed footage of snowcapped mountains during a story about ANWR on December 23, 2005. Yet, the proposed drilling would have taken place on Alaska’s northern coast, nowhere near mountains and only on about 2,000 acres, according to Fox News. “Only the flat and featureless coastal plain would be affected, and even there only a small portion of its 1.5 million acres,” Fox News reported.

Jonah Goldberg, editor-at-large for National Review Online, visited ANWR in 2001. He described the area where proposed drilling would occur as “flat tundra,” and said current oilfields were placed “on a comparatively tiny archipelago of parking-lot-sized islands of human activity in a boundless ocean of tundra.”

Yet, drilling at Prudhoe Bay, nearby the ANWR, has not destroyed species. “Environmental opponents of drilling cannot point to a single species that has been driven to extinction or even a population decline attributable to Prudhoe Bay,” a Heritage Foundation analyst said at FoxNews.com.

Nebraska’s highest court threw out a challenge Friday to a proposed route for the Keystone XL oil pipeline, even though a majority of judges agreed the landowners who sued should have won their case.

The decision removes a major roadblock for the $8 billion cross-continental project that Republicans have vowed to make a key part of their 2015 agenda in Congress.

Four judges on the seven-member Nebraska Supreme Court said the landowners should have won the case. Their lawsuit challenged a 2012 state law that allowed the governor to empower Canada-based TransCanada to force them to sell their property for the project.

But because the lawsuit raised a constitutional question, a supermajority of five judges was needed to rule on the law, meaning “the legislation must stand by default,” the court said in its opinion.

The proposed 1,179-mile pipeline would carry more than 800,000 barrels of crude oil a day from Canada to refineries along the Texas Gulf Coast, passing through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma along the way.

About $1 billion in Japanese funding that Japan claimed was part of a UN initiative to help developing countries take action against climate change went, unnoticed, towards Japanese companies for the construction of three coal-fired power plants, the Associated Press reported Monday.

Coal-burning power plants are the world’s biggest source of atmospheric CO2, a key driver of global warming.

U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres was apparently unaware of where those funds wound up until it was brought to her attention by the AP. Figueres told the AP that “there is no argument” for supporting coal-powered projects with climate money, and that “unabated coal has no room in the future energy system.”

The U.S. government said Wednesday it has decided not to give permission for a proposed pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, a project hailed by the domestic oil industry but denounced by environmental groups and landowners along the proposed route.

“The Department of State recommended to President (Barack) Obama that the presidential permit for the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline be denied and that, at this time, the TransCanada Keystone XL Pipeline be determined not to serve the national interest,” the department said.

Obama, who had delegated the process of evaluating the project to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, said in a separate statement that he agreed with her agency’s recommendation.

The department said it recommended denying the permit because a move by congressional Republicans to fast-track a decision on the pipeline had left it with “insufficient” time.

It added that its “denial of the permit application does not preclude any subsequent permit application or applications for similar projects.”